by NAM LE
Minutes later the door opens again and Black T-shirt hands me a note. His face is insouciant now, verging on rude. By this time I don't care. My heart is hopping. I was wrong. I remembered – she looked straight at me. She wants to see me, she knows it's inevitable. I wait until he's gone before I unfold the note:
Henry,
I don't want to see you. Please meet Jason backstage after the concert (show this note) to discuss a payment plan for the Guadagnini.
***
FIRST, DRAW A BATH. Outside, light thinning into the color of piss. Everything looks like the color of piss. Peel off my jacket, shirt, pants, throw them into a corner where they squat, stiffened from starch and sweat, malevolent. Lidocaine my bloated, inflamed rosebud. Lower it – aaaaarggh – into the steaming hot bath. Then something I haven't done for almost a year: try to sketch. My fingers jiggling. I keep them out of the water, clinching a stick of charcoal, meek above the wet-splotched pad.
Apelman doesn't know I haven't done this at all since Olivia died. Sketched or painted. He doesn't know, either, that I've been seeing her everywhere. Today, though, I saw my daughter. And she saw me. Maybe for the last time. Why am I drawing? Apelman would love the idea: painter turns to art to redeem suffering. Sometimes, if the hand moves, the mind can rest. But not this time. I'm drawing to grab hold of her. If the hurt's all I have left of her, I want to keep it, keep it alive – hurting – because right now I think I need everything I have.
It was her handwriting. Unchanged in four years. She called me by my name.
It starts drizzling outside. The room darkens. Water condenses and runs down the full length of the windows, spills over the curved limestone caps. There's an exhaustion in the quality of the light. On the street, leaves catch moisture, gleam like the scales of dead fish. The gutters go black and wet.
A dot. Another dot. A line between them. I remember the last face I drew. Believe it or not, she, Olivia, was the only one. My single dalliance – through five years of matrimonial, blue-balled freeze-out. She was my risk. When my wife found out about her and blew the country, dangling our daughter from her broom, Olivia told me, "You've made your choice. Don't keep on choosing. Not every day you're with me."
Young women fuck like they're running out of time. It's like they know something. When her time ran out, I sat there, weeks, sketching her. Wondering if she could hear me, sense me, through her coma; if, when she slept, she completed a thought with each breath. An old man and a beautiful, serious young girl. I wondered how long she'd known about the diagnosis. I wondered whether – if I'd known – it would have made a difference. But all I had known was her perfect hunger, the painful playing out of her imperfect satisfaction.
At the hospice, I frightened away her visitors: mostly young people holding tight-bunched, crinkle-wrapped flowers, fuzzy toys, heart-shaped balloons. They came with nothing to say, stretching their lips as though smiling to me. They leaned over her machine-lived body with their face piercings and earplugs and iPods and cell phones and I wanted to rip all their things off, throw them away, and show them – show them – if they wanted so badly to plug the sockets of their bodies-what it was to be fixed upon that bed.
Only Apelman stayed, sitting by me as they pumped cocktail after cocktail into her polluted veins, her self-savaging body, watching me as I watched her ...
The drizzle turns to rain. Outside the glass wall, the last of the color is sucked out of the air. The streets are filthy with debris and the wind picks up papers, plastic wrappers, dead leaves – tosses them on its invisible surf. Holding my hands up, I immerse my head in the bathwater. Suddenly the plumbing of the whole building comes alive, like the massive groaning of the earth itself. I can hear the rain drumming on every exposed surface. Olivia taught me that trick.
I sit up, look out through the glass. I like the rain, how it makes monochrome of things. Even its own noise. People pass by, faces darkened under black umbrellas. Feet mutely slapping shallow puddles. Some caught unprepared: rushing arms crossed, heads bowed, as though shouldering their way out of an emergency room. Others slow down, look up, faces spotted with raindrops, mouths agape, pretending they're actually enjoying it. Chumps.
The drawing takes shape. She's looking at me and her mouth is open. Her hair so dark it looks wet. My wife's sitting on a suitcase crying. They'll be staying, she says, at her friend's place in Bushwick. In her carriage, Elise is asleep, features clouding in dream. She lets out a slight gargle as I pick her up. "Don't," my wife says through her sniffling, "she's sick." I put her back down and tuck her in. It's a relief; she's the only thing that can make my hands feel graceless. Now I see the perfect little beads of sweat on her forehead. Her body giving off warmth like a hot-water bottle. I think about kissing her but don't want to scratch her awake with my whiskers. To the dramatic sounds of my wife's surfacing, strangled sobs, I duck my head and go upstairs. Leaving them on the front stoop. Not knowing that the taxi that comes will take them not to a friend's place in Bushwick but to JFK. Not knowing that it will smuggle my daughter seventeen years away from me. But all that night – night after night – my dreams are filled with the image of her doll-small body on the stoop, burning, fevered with her father's sin.
I try to capture her eyes on the page. In my head – my mind's eye-they're stern, accusing. But then it was either-or, either-or, and knowing what I knew, feeling what I felt, how could she have expected me to choose differently? How much does a moment carry? Across a gap of seventeen years, now she shows me shame again? Blood made hard and broken to bits. On the stage, her eyes were so clear and deep and large and true. The light from them-if she had turned them fully on me-could have made even a dirty old man like me look new again.
I throw down the pad and charcoal, stand up, clean as a corpse. Olivia always got a kick out of that, standing naked in full view of passersby on the street. Apelman's right. Family is family. I look at the floor, at the drawing, her gray-sketched face made bleary by spots of bathwater. As I climb out of the bath I feel warmth dribbling down my legs. I look down and see it – for the first time – blood – in the water: suspended, its pink wisps shifting like the petals of a flower.
Here's what I'll do: Look at myself in the mirror. My face stark white, a shock of bone and skin and hair. My teeth yellow, carious. The valves of my body corroded. Get your clothes on and get working. The order of the day: Get dressed – she's coming today.
Something swanky, maybe the white-tie suit. The satin peak lapel, besom pockets, with the white piqué vest. I pad my underwear with Kleenex to catch the blood. Outside, it's still raining – I skate the sidewalk, finding my way by the light of office buildings. The streets vacant, dark as a lung. When the wind is up it sounds like the trees talk to each other above the noise of a crowd.
I'm late. The performance has already started. In fact, it's almost over. The ticket clerk repeats this before he trots out his supervisor. I tell them who I am. There's a buzzing in my head – the sound of a fluorescent tube – as we argue, and then, finally, I have it in my hands – my ticket.
Side balcony. The signs leading up and up. The carpet is red-plaided and oil-darkened and feels like freshly mown grass – each step sinking in a bit. My footsteps leave damp craters. Music, all the while, audible from behind the neoclassically reliefed walls, floating to me as though from a distant boat. The stairs get steeper. I imagine I can hear it, her centuries-old cello. By the time I reach the top my legs feel weak, hollowed out, flush with hot bathwater and whiskey. My cummerbund is up underneath my nipples, my collar like wet cardboard, every seam in my shirt stamping itself into my skin. Sweat spurting out of every furrow.
"Sir," the gilt-brocaded usher begins, but I stare him down. I recover my breath. Then, slowly, I lean open the heavy door. The sound sudden, heart-flooding. She's onstage, the four of them forming an almost closed circle: playing as though only to each other.
The people in my row half rise, half brace, anything to avoid touching me as I sidle to
my seat. My ass smarts when I sit down. There's a buttress blocking half of my face. I imagine the Leech in the front row, the hatchet silhouette of his head, his gangly legs all stretched out. It doesn't matter, though – I can still hear her, the sound of her cello, full, sonorous, rising through my body and slowly transmuting the pain into warmth, the carry of it through the auditorium, and it's as though my body is without substance and I'm dissolving into the sound she scratches out of her contraption of wood and steel and hair. The concert hall the space inside my skull.
Rain and sweat puddle the floor at my feet. It's getting hot. The music goes on in its slow, gorgeous, devastating burn. When I lean over for a better view my neighbor recoils, initiating a long sequence of public sighing. Now I see her, my Elise. Her head remains still: her bowing neat, precise. Her hair gleams burn-white and black under the spotlight – she's floating out there on a skiff of light – my daughter, my baby girl. A severe beauty all the way through her. My heart hitches underneath its tight cummerbund. I see her. She has everything she needs. She has wrung all my weaknesses out of her strong, straight body.
Get up. I get up. Light in myself, brittle – unable to hear, hold, any more – I breast, woozily, the row of half-risen knees. On the hallway stairs the applause starts up. It sounds like rain. Then, amazingly, there are shouts, stamping feet. I leave the building and go outside-into the brindled rain, the rain become iridescent – into the steel-lamp night. Above the world's dead weight. It's raining outside. I catch my breath and watch as the crowd comes out. She's coming out. She'll be out any second now.
Then I see her – in the walk of a young boy, in the languor of a twenty-year-old – uncommon economy for someone so young – no, there – at fifty, on a billboard, heartbreakingly beautiful and advertising the power of business solutions. Eyes gray, smile gas-blue. A deeper run of colors in her cheekbones. No, no-the darkness, through rain, is deceptive. The crowd empties out of the theater like a last exhalation. I count her as she passes.
It's raining. There she is. Stooped and somehow swanlike, waiting under the corner streetlight. The light drawn into her skin, soaking it, making it refulgent in the black mine of city. A serious young girl. Wind splaying her dark hair. No, I never had a shot-not really. Move, out of breath, toward that shore of light. Catch her and she'll smile, teeth showing-draw it for me-this matter of memory, word by word. Dirty old man. Wait up, Olivia, I'm coming. I see you now! Are you ready? Wait up for me!
Halflead Bay
IT WAS SHAPING UP TO BE A good summer for Jamie. Exams were over. School was out in a couple of weeks – the holidays stretching before him, wide and flat and blue. On top of that he was a hero. Sort of. At assembly that morning, the principal had paused after his name and the school had broken into spontaneous cheering and clapping. Jamie was onstage with the rest of the first eighteen. He could barely make out the faces beneath him – the lights turned off on account of the heat-but what he remembered were voices swelling out of the large, dim hall as though out from one of his daydreams. You couldn't buy that feeling. Still, his dad. Seated in the front row with the other guests of honor – unimpressed as ever. His smile as stiff as his suit.
"C’arn, Halfies!" the principal called out. He opened his arms. From the back of the hall students started stomping their feet.
Jamie had scored the winning goal in last week's semifinal. For the first time in five years, Halflead Bay High had a real crack at reclaiming the pennant. All his school years Jamie couldn't recall even having a conversation with Alan Leyland, the principal, but now Leyland turned around from the podium and half bowed to him. Everyone looked at the two of them. Then the cry was taken up – Halfies! C’arn, Halfies! – even teachers, parents, joining in – Jamie still and rapt in the hot roar until he arrived, again, at his dad's face. The uneasy grin. Of course. The stomping, chanting, Leyland's theatrical attitude: a faint film of mockery slid over it all. Jamie pushed it aside. His dad was wrong, he thought. He was wrong, and anything was possible.
***
ALISON FISCHER APPROACHED HIM AT RECESS.
"Leyland was licking your arse," she said.
He clutched up from the drinking fountain, mouth brimming water, swallowed. "Hi," he said. The word came out in a burp and left a wet trail down his chest.
"Hi yourself."
She stood with her head cocked to one side, hip to the other. Her school dress was stretched so tight it bit into her thigh. He wiped his mouth, looked around. Alison Fischer. It was a morning of firsts.
"Leyland couldn't be stuffed about footy."
"What?"
"He's thinking about enrollments," Jamie said. He tried to remember how his mum had put it. "He just wants the pennant to sucker new parents."
"Shove over," Alison ordered. She bent down to the nozzle and pursed her mouth in a glossy O. Her top button was undone – sprung open as though by heat – and he could see the inside line of her breasts. The stripe of sweat gleaming between them.
She said, "I've seen you down at the wharf." Her lips bright wet.
"I'm working there these holidays."
"Nah, the jetty, I mean. Fishing. With that surfie mate of yours."
"Cale?"
He looked around again. Most of the kids had stayed indoors for recess; others were lying in shade, as still as snakes, under the casuarinas. It was too hot for sport. Off in the paddocks a knot of boys poked at something on the ground. Alison switched hips and smiled patiently at him.
"That was your dad in there, right?"
"My dad?" He laughed weakly.
"With the tie."
This was how it happened: these girls, they did it for kicks, daring each other to go up to random blokes and act interested. He'd seen it before. A gaggle of them – Alison their leader – sitting apart from everyone else, watching on; they sealed off even their amusement, coughing it around their circle like a wet scrap. Tammie, Kate, Laura-all the rest of them, faces mocked up-they were bored with everything and totally up themselves and every boy at Halflead wanted them.
"He didn't even come to the game."
"My parents," she said, "after that game." Her smile went lopsided. "I reckon they'd adopt you."
He pretended to wave away a fly, looked around again. None of them were in sight. No Dory either. The sound of a piano started up from somewhere – each note hung-tin-fiat, percussive – then evaporated in the heat. So she wanted to talk about the game. No way they'd mess with him, not after last weekend. That assembly. She was alone. She was smiling at him as though she didn't belong to somebody else.,
"That'd make you my sister."
"We couldn't have that, right?"
Whoever was at the piano was a beginner, trying out a new scale: slow, stop-start. Jamie felt himself trapped between the notes, inside the heavy spaces where nothing moved. He realized his whole body was sweating. So she'd talk about his dad – himself sweating in that funereal suit, several sizes too small for him, cuffs up past his wrists – and he'd let her. Applause in his ears. That wry, skeptical smirk.
"So you reckon we can beat Maroomba?"
"I'm there heaps," he said. His voice came out rougher than he'd intended. "The jetty, I mean."
"What?"
"Don't be such a bloody snob. Say hi next time."
"And then what?"
"What are you after?"
"Alison!" a voice called from the school building. Everyone started moving back inside. The sound of the piano petered out, blaring moments later as passing hands bashed its keys.
She leaned toward him. That band of sweat between her breasts – he wanted to bring his mouth to it and lick it up. He wanted her to giggle, push him away, tell him it tickled. Her smile seemed different now.
"I can teach you how to squid," he said.
"Fuck," she said in a low voice, "you're a fast worker, aren't you?"
He didn't say anything.
"Who would've guessed it. Loose Ball Jamie – that's what they call you, right
?"
His face flushed. Someone shouted her name again. The school grounds were almost empty now but he had the overwhelming feeling of being watched. Every window in the building blazed with reflected light.
He inclined his head in the classroom's general direction. "We should – "
"So is that what I am? A loose ball?" Her voice went weird, slightly off-pitched: " 'Just come down to the jetty and say hi?' "
The sweat on her collarbones, too, burned white in the sun. The back of her hip-cocked arm. That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at.
He looked at her face. She was grinning crookedly, her mouth still wet.
***
DORY'S GIRL – SHE WAS DORY'S GIRL – but then who knew how serious that was? Jamie had liked her forever. And not just in the way everyone talked, in the change rooms, about chicks at school: Laura Brescia, who wore a G-string under her school uniform; Tammie K, who gave Nick a head job and then gave Jimmy one as well so he wouldn't dob about Nick to her big-smoke boyfriend. She was gagging but kept going, Jimmy crowed. He mimed it: gripping her long hair, kneading it into her scalp. No – Alison was more than that. She ran with that crowd but kept herself apart, reserving herself, everyone knew, for the thrall of the big city. Where her family – and their money – were from. Where everyone assumed she'd head once accepted into the university there next year. Until this morning, Jamie would never even have thought to lob his hopes that high.
Still. Dory Townsend. You'd have to be a lunatic.
***
THEY LIVED, THE FOUR OF THEM, on a spur overlooking the sea. Their house must have been one of the most elevated in town. His parents had bought it twenty years ago, back when HalfleadBay was little more than a petrol station and stopover to and from the city. According to Jamie's mum, that was how they'd first met: she was filling up the tank of her rented car when his dad's crew traipsed up from the wharf and into the pub. He was the one who walked without moving his hands. Hungry, worn out from her day in an adverse office – she worked, then, as a forensic accountant – she'd decided to go in too, for a counter meal. Two months later – her own car fully loaded, her career resolutely behind her – she returned to seek out the man who'd seemed, all that evening, to stand for a world of simpler details: a big sky, a sustaining sea, a chance to do work whose usefulness a child could understand.